638 PSYCHOLOGY. 



admitted to form an enormous part of human wisdom. The 

 ^ scientific ' truths have to harmonize with these truths, or 

 be given up as useless ; but they arise in the mind in no 

 •such passive associative way as that in which the simpler 

 iruths arise. Even those experiences which are used to 

 prove a scientific truth are for the most part artificial expe- 

 riences of the laboratory gained after the truth itself has 

 been conjectured. Instead of experiences engendering the 

 * inner relations,' the inner relations are what engender the 

 experiences here. 



What happens in the brain after experience has done its 

 utmost is what happens in every material mass which has 

 been fashioned by an outward force, — in every pudding or 

 mortar, for example, which I may make with my hands. 

 The fashioning from without brings the elements into collo^ 

 cations which set new internal forces free to exert their 

 effects in turn. And the random irradiations and resettle- 

 ments of our ideas, which supervene upon experience, and 

 constitute our free mental play, are due entirely to these 

 secondary internal processes, which vary enormously from 

 brain to brain, even though the brains be exposed to 

 -exactly the same ' outer relations.' The higher thought- 

 processes owe their being to causes which correspond far 

 more to the sourings and fermentations of dough, the setting 

 of mortar, or the subsidence of sediments in mixtures, than 

 to the manipulations by which these physical aggregates 

 came to be conij)ounded. Our study of similar association 

 and reasoning taught us that the whole superiority of man 

 depended on the facility with which in his brain the paths 

 worn by the most frequent outer cohesions could be rup- 

 tured. The causes of the instability, the reasons why now 

 this point and now that become in him the seat of rupture, 



harmonize with the conditions of Ms thinking, the latter do not; in the 

 former his concepts, judgments, inferences apply to realities, in the 

 latter they have no such application. And thus the intellectual satisfac 

 tion which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him 

 the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world 

 those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fun- 

 damental element and guiding principle of his own thought." (C. Sigwart: 

 Logik, II 380-2.) 



